All is Dust: The Tale of the Thousand Sons Legion
by Mainstay
Summary: This is a fictional historical essay that I wrote for an English project that I ended up not using. The title kind of says it al. It's only rated K-plus instead of K for violence. The footnotes are because it was originally for someone new to WH40k.


**All is Dust: Tales of the Thousand Sons Legion**

**By Jonathan Lindenbaum, 8Y, 4/2/12-4/12**

In case of misunderstanding or confusing terms, search at .com/

DISCLAIMER: Warhammer 40,000™ and Warhammer Fantasy Battle™ are property of Games Workshop Ltd.

**Part I: Magnus the Red, Primarch**

Magnus the Red, also known as the Red Cyclops or the Crimson King, was one of the Emperor of Mankind's primarchs, who were created from his genetic material and were altered to become super-human. During their creation, the forces of Chaos created a portal inside the gestation chambers, scattering the twenty primarchs across the galaxy. Magnus was the only primarch who remembered his origins and who he was. He landed on the mining world of Prospero, whose occupants had the unique ability to use the powers of the Warp, or Empyrean. These people are known in the Imperium as psykers, and Magnus was the only one of the primarchs to possess psychic abilities.

Magnus grew up in Prospero's only occupied city – Tizca, the City of Light. He became a ward or the psychic leaders and scholars of Prospero and quickly gained their powers. He became greater than his master, Amon, the most powerful psyker on Prospero at that time. Magnus mastered every psychic training program and soon became the most powerful man on Prospero, and was elevated to be the rightful leader. He began a campaign to rid the planet of the psychneuein, psychic beasts that roamed freely, terrorizing the humans. Magnus rebuilt Tizca and the other abandoned cities, making Prospero widely recognized as the most beautiful planet in the galaxy. With such a powerful mind, the Emperor soon noticed Magnus's presence and they were reunited. Magnus and the Emperor went on long journeys into the Warp, where they discovered many things and accumulated a great deal of knowledge.

The Emperor had created Legions of ten thousand men from the gene-seeds (genetic material) of the primarchs, and when the primarchs were found, they were each assigned command of their legion. Magnus was given command of the Thousand Sons Legion (XV Legion out of the original 20), named so because there were usually only a thousand of them active at any given time. This was because the gene-seed was unstable, and therefore the Thousand Sons were prone to mutations. They were originally not allowed to fight in the Great Crusade, the Emperor's crusade to unify the galaxy for mankind. But Magnus promised that he would find a cure, and he searched the Warp frantically. He solved the problem and the mutations stopped, but his right eye disappeared (just blank skin), and he made a deal with the Chaos God of Sorcery and Change, Tzeentch, to help him. Tzeentch actually tricked Magnus, into believing he had conquered the Chaos entities, in order to increase his arrogance. In any case – because of the selfless efforts of Magnus to save his Legion, the growing suspicion of psykers in the Imperium, and their shared psychic talents, Magnus and his Legion had what was probably the closest bond between primarch and Legion, closer than Sanguinius and the Blood Angels, and Lorgar and the Word Bearers.

**Part II: The Great Crusade**

Magnus was always a wild and impetuous commander. His…expeditions, for lack of a better word, in the 28th Expeditionary Force took him onto many planets where psychic powers flourished. Though the Emperor warned Magnus to shun such matters, Magnus began to collect psychic lore in _The Book of Magnus_, a volume containing all knowledge of sorcery and psychic power. It was affixed to his armour and locked so only he could open it. Many primarchs distrusted Magnus for his use of sorcery, and for use of deceit and trickery to win battles rather than brute force. In a joint deployment of the Thousand Sons and the Space Wolves (VI Legion), the latter's primarch Leman Russ almost came to blows with Magnus, and would have if not for the intervention of Lorgar, primarch of the Word Bearers (XVII Legion).

The Emperor called a conference of the primarchs at the planet of Nikaea, on the topic of sorcery. This was known as the Council of Nikaea. The Council collectively ruled that sorcery was to be illegal in the Imperium, but that found psykers should be sanctioned and trained. The Council also appointed a new position in the Space Marine Legions, the Chaplain, to maintain the purity of the Legions. Magnus was unhappy and disappointed with the rulings, and tried to circumvent it with rationalizations and justifications many times.

**Part III: The Horus Heresy**

After the Emperor gave overall command of the Crusade over to Horus, primarch of the Luna Wolves Legion (XVI Legion), Magnus meditated on Prospero for some time. He psychically saw the corruption of Horus by Chaos, and the events of the Horus Heresy: the betrayal of the Emperor by half the Legions, and the sundering of the Imperium by a costly civil war. The vision did not reveal Magnus's own fate. Magnus used the power of his Legion's greatest psykers to inform the Emperor of the impending betrayal, using sorcery rather than the unreliable but legal means of astrotelepathy (look that up under Adeptus Astra Telapathica).

The Emperor, on Terra (Earth), had been working on the Imperial Webway. The Webway was a transportation form used by the Eldar race, whose psychic senses were too attuned to the Warp to travel it safely. The Emperor hoped to harness the Webway to connect the Imperium together. However, Magnus used the Webway to relay his message (which he was able to access but not fully understand, resulting in this), which ruined the project. Furious at the results and Magnus's breaking of the Council's rulings, the Emperor ordered Leman Russ (who had a rivalry with Magnus and a hatred of sorcery, see part II) to bring Magnus to face judgement. Horus, who had already been corrupted, convinced Russ that the Emperor wanted Magnus destroyed with his Legion rather than to be brought to Terra. Russ believed him, because of Horus's status as Warmaster. The entire Space Wolves Legion, along with millions of the Imperial Guard, traveled to destroy Prospero.

Magnus had realized in the meantime that he had been a pawn of Tzeentch, and in his remorse, decided to let himself and his Legion be killed rather than to serve Chaos. He placed a psychic veil over Prospero, did not warn anyone of the coming invasion, and sent the Thousand Sons' fleet away on some excuse. Thus, the Legion was completely taken off-guard by the attack. The Imperial bombardment reduced Prospero to a burned-out slab of rock, but Tizca was surrounded by a void shield, so an invasion of the city was staged. The libraries of psychic knowledge were destroyed, sending Magnus into a deep melancholy. But still, he was convinced he had done nothing to merit such retaliation from his father the Emperor. He took to the battlefield to fight the Space Wolves.

Magnus shattered the assault with his psychic powers, eventually meeting Leman Russ in combat. At the climax, Magnus shattered Russ's breastplate and punctured one of his hearts (all primarchs and Space Marines have two hearts and three or four lungs), but Russ held onto his arm and kicked Magnus in his single eye. With Magnus blinded, Russ lifted him into the air and broke his back. In his moment of greatest need, Tzeentch offered to save Magnus, his Legion, and Tizca, if he pledged himself to the Chaos God of Change and Sorcery (Tzeentch). Magnus did so, and his legion was teleported, along with Tizca, to a Daemon World later named the Planet of the Sorcerers.

**Part IV: The Rubric of Ahriman**

**[**Each Legion of Space Marines had their own psykers, called Librarians, and also had a very powerful psyker to lead them – the Chief Librarian. Azhek Ahriman was once the Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons, and was probably the fourth-most powerful psyker in the universe, after Magnus, Malcador the Sigilite (look him up), and the Emperor of Mankind himself.**]**

Aside from Tzeentch's gift of the Legion's new planet, he also saw fit to give another 'gift': the return of the Legion's aberrant genetic mutations. This threatened to turn the entire Legion into mindless Chaos Spawn unless stopped. Ahriman led a group of high-ranking officials of the Sons to form a secret Council of Sorcerers to find a way to stop the mutations. The cabal created an incantation, led by Ahriman, which backfired terribly. Those of the Legion with no psychic powers' organic bodies were turned to ash, their souls trapped inside their Power Armour, turning them into living automations. Every joint of the armour was magically sealed, and the only way the souls could be freed was for the armour to be destroyed. The minority of the Legion that did have psychic powers found their powers increased vastly, much more powerful than most Loyalist (Legions still loyal to the Imperium) Librarians, or even Chief Librarians.

Because of Magnus's strong bond with his sons, he felt their suffering keenly. Angered and filled with grief (but also some pride at the psychic prowess of his Legion), he personally assaulted, and soon he caught up with Ahriman himself. He bested his former adviser in a duel, but Tzeentch prevented his death, saying, "You destroy my pawns too easily." Instead, Magnus (now a Lord of Change and Daemon Prince) exiled Ahriman and his cabal to roam the galaxy forever, in search of the true meaning of Chaos.

_"At present, Magnus's ever-changing form resides on the Planet of the Sorcerers within the Eye of Terror. Here, Magnus stands atop the tallest of the towers in his mockery of lost Tizca, the Tower of the Cyclops, and its vast sorcerous eye surveys the entire planet as he plots the destruction of the Imperium of Man and the Emperor he believes betrayed him so long ago." –The Black Library of Chaos_


End file.
